Fresh off the press, Janelle Monae’s new book The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer was released today.
Based on Janelle Monae’s grammy-nominated album Dirty Computer, Monae’s bold and powerfully told new book The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer has hit the book stores.
Walking the lines between Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, and science fiction, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a collection of short stories that explores different tales of liberation, queerness, race, and gender all wrapped up in a totalitarian landscape.
Discussing the origins of the book in a recent interview with Kirkus reviews, Monae shared: “I sat down in the pandemic, 2020, and I finally said that there’s more,” she said. “I was on mushrooms, and I just came up with all of these thought experiments, where I was like, ‘What if there was this Black woman, she was the memory keeper of this city? She knew all of the people’s memories before they were cleaned, before their identities were wiped clean, and she wants to fall in love.…That’s the first [story].”
Co-written with Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas, Monae emphatically credits her co-authors, sharing in the collaborative process “Each short story, I partnered with a writer, I just want to make sure I shout them out because this was a super innovative way of releasing a book…It’s like a compilation album. It’s like a mixtape.”
“Who holds your memories?”
The official cover for THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN and Other Stories of Dirty Computer. APRIL 2022. Pre-Order now avail. 🤖 pic.twitter.com/2GE3kfXssE
— Janelle Monáe👽🚆🤖🚀🪐 (@JanelleMonae) December 2, 2021
The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer is out now.
